Great article! I really liked the zooming photo/movie shots from above!

It is a great article. Thanks for posting it!

This stood out for me as a former owner of lakefront property:

quote:

In 2013, Lake Michigan plunged to a low not seen since record-keeping began in the mid-1800s, wreaking havoc across the Midwest. Marina docks became useless catwalks. Freighter captains couldn’t fully load their ships. And fears grew that the lake would drop so low it would no longer be able to feed the Chicago River, the defining waterway that snakes through the heart of the city.

That fear was short-lived. Just a year later, in 2014, the lake started climbing at a stunning rate, ultimately setting a record summertime high in 2019 before drought took hold and water levels started plunging again.

In just seven years, Lake Michigan had swung more than six feet. It was an ominous sign that the inland sea, yoked for centuries to its historic shoreline, is starting to buck.

I know I've posted pics of residential buildings on the lake here in Chicago during recent winters; the water sprays up on the sides and ices everything over.

We saw the effects of the changing lake levels up close and personal up in Wisconsin.

Our former Door County, WI vacation home is on Lake Michigan. We bought the land in 1988, when lake levels were at very high levels. During the intervening years we watched the lake levels fall and rise and fall multiple times. In 2013 the docks in the harbors on the Green Bay side of the peninsula were unusable because they were so far up above the water. That year, on (our) Lake Michigan side, we had to walk several hundred feet to get to the water; when we bought the property in 88, the water came right up to the tree line and there was no beach.

When we went to sell in 2019, the lake was almost back up to the record levels of the 80s and our crawl space was below lake level. The sump pump was going off constantly. The lake water was moving through the porous dolomitic limestone below and basically trying to fill the in-ground swimming pool called our crawl space. For anyone wanting to delve into Door County geology:

https://wisco2012.blogspot.com...-of-door-county.html

We're no match for Mother Nature.....

Good article! If you Google the title you can find it on other websites that don't have a paywall.

The author's book "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes" is also very good.